Metro advertising in Bengaluru

Namma Metro sells three different audiences under one name. The person standing in the station, who walked in from the surrounding streets. The person inside the train, who is travelling the length of a line. And the driver waiting under the viaduct, who may never have taken the metro at all. A proposal that says "metro advertising, Bengaluru" and quotes one number has not told you which of the three you are buying.

The lines, and who is actually on them

The Purple Line runs east to west, from the Whitefield side through Byappanahalli, Indiranagar, MG Road and Majestic, then out through Magadi Road, Vijayanagar, Mysore Road, Jnanabharathi and Kengeri. The eastern half carries the tech workforce and the central stretch carries office workers and shoppers around MG Road and Trinity. West of Majestic it becomes a completely different railway: settled west Bengaluru households, students heading to the university campus at Jnanabharathi, and commuters coming in from Kengeri and beyond.

The Green Line runs north to south, from the Tumkur Road side through the Peenya industrial belt and Yeshwanthpur, past Rajajinagar and Majestic. Then it goes into Chickpet and KR Market before Jayanagar, Banashankari and JP Nagar. This is the trading line. The stations in the old market area carry wholesale buyers, shop staff and families who have shopped there for two generations, and the southern stretch carries households and students.

The Yellow Line runs south from RV Road towards Electronic City and Bommasandra. That corridor is its own island: people who work and live along it rarely come into the city on a weekday.

Majestic is where the two older lines cross, next to the main bus station and the city railway station. It is the heaviest crossing of people in Bengaluru and it is priced like it.

Other corridors are under construction, including the one towards the airport. Buy what is running on the day your cycle starts.

Three products, three owners

Inside the station there is the unpaid concourse, the area past the gates, the platform, the escalator and the security queue. Formats sit at eye level in each, and the paid area holds fewer people for far longer.

Inside the train there are panels above the seats and along the doors, and the outside of a train can be wrapped. The train is a line-wide buy: the same panel travels Kengeri to Whitefield and back all day.

Under the viaduct, the pillars and the barricades along a construction stretch face road traffic. They reach a driver who is not moving, which makes them closer in character to a hoarding than to station media.

These are sold under different contracts. BMRCL controls station and train media through the concessionaire that holds it. Barricades along a construction package can belong to whoever is building that stretch. A feeder bus belongs to BMTC, and the shop inside the station is its own tenant. Ask who owns the space and what paper says so, because a bundled "metro package" mixing all four is a bundle nobody can be held to.

A station's catchment is a walk plus a shared auto

The useful catchment is whatever is within a comfortable walk, plus the autos waiting outside. That is a small circle, and it is not symmetrical. At most Bengaluru stations, one exit opens towards the shops and the other lands beside a road nobody crosses on foot.

Two kinds of station behave differently from the rest. The market stations in Chickpet and around KR Market feed directly into lanes of shops, so the person coming up the stairs is already in buying mode. The end-of-line stations at Kengeri, Bommasandra, Silk Institute and on the Tumkur Road side behave differently. They collect people who rode in on two-wheelers from well outside the metro area, which is the one place metro media reaches the outskirts.

Language, and what the panel has to do in four seconds

Signage in the system is in three languages and the advertising is not. On the eastern stretch and around MG Road, English is read without a thought. On the Mysore Road, Chickpet, Peenya and Banashankari stretches, Kannada reads as a local business speaking to its own neighbourhood. No national brand can do that.

Write for a person holding a phone. Nobody will dial a number on a platform. Give a name that survives being half remembered and searched later, and put a code or a short address on it if you want to count anything. The creative detail is covered in how to advertise to metro commuters; the buying decision is which station, which exit and how long.

One address, or the whole city

A business with one showroom should buy one station and hold it. The value of metro media for you is repetition. The same two thousand people pass the same panel twice a day, and by the third week your name is familiar. A ten-station package sold as a Bengaluru plan spreads that money across catchments you cannot serve. In this traffic, nobody travels from Banashankari to Marathahalli because of a poster.

A business selling across the city buys differently. A line rather than a point, or the interchange, or trains that run the corridor all day. Metro advertising is where we buy both; what it costs across India is a separate page.

What a Bengaluru quotation must break out

• The station by name, the panel numbers, and which exit or platform each one faces
• Whether it is inside the paid area or before the gates
• A photograph dated this month, taken from where the commuter walks
• The line, and whether the panel faces boarding or alighting passengers
• Trains as a separate line, with how many rakes and on which line they run
• Pillars and barricades as their own line, named as road media
• Who holds the concession for each item, and until when
• Artwork approval, the material specified, and the installation window
• What happens to the balance of your cycle if a station or stretch is closed
• Taxes, written out

When metro media is the wrong buy here

When your catchment is a road rather than a corridor. A showroom on Magadi Road wants the traffic on Magadi Road, and that is a pillar or a hoarding, not a platform.

When your buyer arrives by car. Big-ticket goods, families with young children and most industrial buyers are not on the train.

When you are buying a fortnight. This medium works on repetition, and a short burst is the one thing it cannot do.

When nothing behind the name is ready. A commuter photographs the panel, searches you that night, and lands on whatever is there. If that is an unclaimed listing, the panel has advertised your weakest link at the city's best footfall.

What to do next

Pick the station nearest your business and stand at both exits during the evening peak. Count which way people turn. That half hour tells you more than any deck, and it is the same walk we would take for you from our office in Nagarbhavi. If you want the catchment read against your own enquiry list, book the free audit.